Partitioning Communciations System for safe and secure distributed systems

Abstract

The partitioning communications system (PCS) is an architecture for high assurance safe and secure distributed systems. The PCS provides strong authentication, trustworthy separation of data by safety or sensitivity level, secure network configuration, secure loading of signed images, and covert channel suppression. Channel resources are managed, increasing total throughput while guaranteeing quality of service. Derivation of requirements from threat analysis is presented along with an overview of how the PCS works as transparent network middleware supporting traditional middleware facilities such as CORBA, DDS, .NET, web objects, SQL DBMS, EJB, etc. Transparent support for these facilities eliminates the need to change them, leveraging prior certifications to minimize cost and schedule risk when combining multiple functions into an integrated modular avionics (IMA) environment to save size, weight, and power. The PCS also simplifies implementation of new applications or migration of legacy systems to network-centric operations, such as the global information grid.